Most of our competitors use specialized hardware for their bandwidth management solutions. We don’t.
So people always ask the same question: How can your products perform that well without a high performance accelerator chip? And then we explain why it is a good idea not to use specialized hardware: it is all about reliability, flexibility and performance.

Reliability:
Every component of the hardware we use for our products has been sold millions of times by thousands of different companies. The probability of a hidden bug is significantly smaller than with a hardware that has been developed for a single purpose and of which a few hundreds have been sold by a single company. Standard tools already in use by hundreds of thousands of other developers make the development of our software efficient and secure.

Flexibility:
Our software does not require any special hardware. It can be used to handle very low-speed network links, but, with the right hardware, easily scales to manage the network traffic of an entire country. Since we are not bound to a special hardware vendor, we can pick the right components to deliver our customers a solution dimensioned to their current needs.

Performance:
The most doubtful faces we see when we speak about the performance. In the world of sports cars nothing is better than horsepower but more horsepower. Horsepower is the indicator for speed, for quality, for simply “how good is this car”. In the same way, most people cannot imagine how we achieve our performance values without an expensive engine brimming over with horsepower.

So, how do we actually reach our performance without a dedicated accelerator chip or network processing unit (NPU)? The reason is very simple. The basic packet handling in our systems takes only about 20% of the available processing power. Modern Internet traffic management is much more than receiving a network packet, do some basic operations on it, and then forward or drop it. In fact, the Traffic Manager has to calculate very complex heuristics to detect encrypted or highly obfuscated traffic (like encrypted BitTorrent, OpenVPN or Skype). It needs to access multiple gigabytes of memory as quickly as possible to correlate a huge number of flows on a backbone link and to handle millions of subscribers. Careful cache optimization, branch prediction and a smart and scalable multithreading architecture are much more important than an accelerated packet handling.

And this is it. No tricks. No magic. Only getting the most out of the fastest available hardware on the market.

Tags: hardware, network accelerator chip, NPU, performance

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 09:38:30 by Hendrik Schulze. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.